This invention relates generally to social networking and, in particular, to displaying information about users of a social networking system.
Social networking systems capture large volumes of information from various sources. Information stored by the social networking system will often, if not always, have a time associated with it. Typically, information about a user of a social networking system is displayed through a profile web page that is divided into sections, each section containing different types of information pertaining to the user. For example, a user's profile page may have separate sections for educational information, interests, status updates, and hobbies, as well as a section containing thumbnails of photos of the user, and links to the user's friends.
The shortcoming of this sort of display is that as the social networking system accumulates more and more information about the user over time, it becomes difficult to locate older information about the user, since the user's profile page has a limited amount of display space, and the system is constantly obtaining new information as the user adds new photos, friends, status updates, etc. Although viewers of a user's profile page are often interested in the newest information about a user, this will not always be the case. For example, old classmates of a user may wish to browse information about the user from a shared time together at university that occurred many years earlier.
Furthermore, since there is a large variety of information being captured in large volumes by the social networking system, there is a need for ways to aggregate information in compact yet informative structures, so that users can efficiently consume such information. In addition, information from a certain time period often has a relationship to other types of information from the same time period, which makes it desirable to associate or display such information together. For example, it may be interesting for viewers to see photos of a user from his college days in conjunction with that user's status updates from the same period. However, if the user's profile page displays information segmented by information type, then viewers wishing to view the user's historical information are forced to manually search for that information in each information section individually. This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to view different types of information related to a particular time period concurrently. In addition, if a user has a large amount of information in a particular time period, it would be desirable for there to be some way to select the most relevant information for presentation to viewers. It would also be beneficial to enable users to provide data associated with a time period to the social networking system in a structured manner, so that the system can present this information to viewers in an organized and consistent way.